Book Reviews 04/2015

Following the events of the Arab Spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her latest book, “Heretic,” she came to the conclusion that “ordinary Muslims are ready for change.” Hirsi Ali has strong thoughts on what form that change should take for Muslims: a ...(Apr 1, 2015, New York Times)

At Ganapati's Feet: book review

The last chapter is really worth buying the book for! It is instructions for a Ganesh Puja! I loved this book and I hope to work with Mr. Dillard-Wright in the future on some collaborative projects. I also hope that Patheos will take this book on as a ...(Apr 1, 2015, Patheos (blog))

A Filmmaker's Surreal Vision On The Page In 'Where The Bird Sings Best'

... Bird Sings Best — but it doesn't feel like it's native to our universe. Still, in this absurd and glorious carnival, he is the only one worthy to be called the keeper or tamer of anything. Juan Vidal is a writer and critic for NPR Books. He's on ...(Apr 1, 2015, NPR)

Book review: 'The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the ...

Dumped doesn't offer the hyper-positive messages common in many women's self-help books. Many writers analyze their own neediness or their unflattering motivations for wanting a particular friend, and there are only a few essays in which the writer and ...(Apr 1, 2015, Seven Days)

Book Review: “Infinite Worlds: People & Places of Space Exploration” by ...

When “The Given Day” arrived in 2008, Dennis Lehane described his 704-page magnum opus as the beginning of a possible trilogy. That's not exactly how things worked out. Instead of sequels, he wound up producing a very loosely linked trio, adding on ...(Apr 1, 2015, New York Times)

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Loneliness of the Black Republican'

Leah Wright Rigueur's book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” provides an intellectual and thought-provoking voice to this intriguing debate. The author, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government ...(Apr 1, 2015, Washington Times)

Playing Dumb in Palestine

It's hard to find an Israeli in Mr. Tenenbom's book who seems fully alive to the political challenges the country is confronting. Mr. Tenenbom's often-charming vignettes thus produce a bleak conclusion: The Jewish state faces concerted efforts to ...(Apr 1, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

New York City, then and now: Top, a view of One Times Square in 1952 at left, and the area today. Above left photos show a crowd on Wall Street on V-E Day in 1945 and the same view today; above right photos show a fire at Fulton and Greenwich streets, ...(Apr 2, 2015, NorthJersey.com)

The Harder They Come by TC Boyle

As the book's jacket confirms, the amped-up sum of this trio leads to the book's grim finale—a hard fall indeed, brimming with automatic weapon fire, sex and a vivid interpretation of Mountain Man John Colter's story. Like the best of his work, Boyle ...(Apr 2, 2015, Paste Magazine)

Book Review: Behind The Cloud

The format of the book is a bit different from the norm. Rather than a chronologically-ordered narrative divided into just a few chapters, the ever unconventional Benioff provides one hundred and eleven "plays" through which he reveals lessons he ...(Apr 2, 2015, GuruFocus.com (registration))

Zornberg's fourth book, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, was published at the end of February. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, the author, teacher, scholar and Jerusalem resident says that working in two languages “allows you ...(Apr 2, 2015, Jerusalem Post Israel News)

Book review: 'The Soccer Diaries,' by Michael J. Agovino

There should probably be a word for this kind of book: the telling of a life, from childhood to adulthood, intertwined with a sport, and how the former is informed by the latter. A non-sportsperson's sporting memoir, maybe, though that's a touch clunky ...(Apr 2, 2015, SB Nation)

Book Review: Jex Malone by CL Gaber and VC Stanley

Jex Malone Simply put, this novel was a big disappointment for me in so many ways. To be fair, I broke the numero uno code of honor of all readers: I judged the book by the cover. I expected the protagonist to be a badass modern day Nancy Drew who took ...(Apr 2, 2015, The Young Folks)

Book review: In Some Other World Maybe

Looking for a good Spring Break read? Fall into the world of Phoebe, Adam, Sharon and Oliver. Shari Goldhagen's "In Some Other World, Maybe" is the perfect beach/hotel pool/trip to your relatives kind of read. Not too heavy but definitely engaging—so ...(Apr 2, 2015, ChicagoNow (blog))

All the President's Men

Virginia neighbors George Washington and George Mason were close friends for more than three decades. They had both taken part in the Constitutional Convention in 1787—but Mason, who had wanted a strong bill of rights, had left the convention in ...(Apr 2, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Buried Giant'

Readers of Mr. Ishiguro's other books will know that he has also made forays into nonrealist genres, notably into dystopian sci-fi with “Never Let Me Go.” Even so, “The Buried Giant,” his first novel in 10 years, is likely to surprise with its ...(Apr 2, 2015, Washington Times)

Book review: 'Sacred Spaces,' a report on Modernism in religious buildinghs

Beautifully photographed, and elegantly elucidated by James Pallister, “Sacred Spaces” is a field report from the cult of Corbusier. The 30 new religious buildings in this intriguing book represent every major faith, and the locales range from the ...(Apr 3, 2015, Washington Post)

The Miracle of the Heavens

'This is a crime story.” It is a startling way to begin a book about one of history's greatest scientists. What the authors of “Galileo's Telescope” mean is that Galileo, as a consequence of his planetary observations in the early 17th century, “robbed ...(Apr 3, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

The Ghosts of Lady Day

Conceived as a “meditation on [Holiday's] art and its relation to her life,” rather than a straight-ahead biography, Mr. Szwed's book persuasively reappraises one of the most influential American singers of the 20th century, even if, in the end, it ...(Apr 3, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

Billy the Id

Energetically reported and skillfully written, the book is enormously entertaining. Without pretension, it explores the question whether a baseball lifer can actually be a tragic figure in the classic sense—a man destroyed by the very qualities than ...(Apr 3, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

Acts of God in the Caribbean

In this book, Stuart B. Schwartz focuses on a few dozen of them, mixing narratives of instantaneous destruction with an attempt to analyze the broader political consequences of a climate regime that features such destructive storms. Mr. Schwartz, a ...(Apr 3, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

St. Louis Bore Him

Managed by his second wife, Valerie, until her death in 2012, the estate regularly denied permission to quote from his manuscripts and published work, which forced earlier biographers Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon to rely heavily on summary. Mr ...(Apr 3, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

An Organizer for Victory

In Partisan Review, he mocked the “absurd verbiage” of the 1948 Party decree against musical “formalism. ... In his book “The Liberal Conspiracy” (1989), Peter Coleman (with more detail than Mr. Giroud provides) notes that Nabokov's first festival ...(Apr 3, 2015, Wall Street Journal)

Idea to App book review; first base for iOS app creation

Building an app starts with a concept, and idea, a vision. If you don't have a guiding light in mind, you're just doing. That isn't necessarily creating. Idea to App: The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Making iOS Apps is a new book from Megan Holstein ...(Apr 3, 2015, SlashGear)

Book Review 342: The Chairman John McCloy

Bird's book came out in 1992. He wrote that the Establishment “continues to define the parameters of sound thinking on the great imponderables of public policy. The ideas that the American Establishment stood for are still the driving ideas of the ...(Apr 3, 2015, Maui News (blog))

Samsung ATIV Book 9 12.2-inch review

Catering to mobile business professionals, Samsung's ATIV Book laptops have focused on becoming thinner and quieter in hopes of providing a PC alternative to the Macbook Air (and now, the upcoming MacBook). And in the arms race of ever-shrinking ...(Apr 4, 2015, Digital Trends)

Women deployed with Special Ops hailed in book

The book, scheduled for release by Harper on April 21, zeroes in on a pioneering group of women warriors at a time when their contributions could help to radically reconfigure the U.S. armed forces. When White was killed in action, Defense Department ...(Apr 4, 2015, U-T San Diego)

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Calling

It's no secret that Robert Galbraith is the nom-de-plum of J.K. Rowling for writing mysteries. That may or may not be a good thing (more on that later). When she finished with the final Harry Potter book, she told people she was working on a mystery ...(Apr 4, 2015, The Independent | SUindependent.com)

Book review: Jamie Kornegay on 'Teeth of the Souls'

A Review of. “The Teeth of the Souls”. By Steve Yates. Moon City Press. $32.95, hardback, 408 pages. “Your life's been a lie you didn't even know you was telling,” one character tells another near the end of Steve Yates's new novel, “The Teeth of the ...(Apr 4, 2015, Jackson Clarion Ledger)

'American Warlord: A True Story' by Johnny Dwyer

This was horrific stuff: electric shocks, cutting off toes, forced drinking of urine, rape, prolonged isolation in holes in the ground, and summary executions. After Charles Taylor's government fell in 2003, Chucky fled to Trinidad. Three years later ...(Apr 4, 2015, Boston Globe (subscription))

But despite these shared concerns, their diaries have led to strikingly different books. When she began keeping the two-year chronicle that became “The Folded Clock: A Diary,'' Julavits, a novelist and editor, “was no longer, or not for the time being ...(Apr 4, 2015, Boston Globe (subscription))

Book review: Searching 'The Lost World of the Old Ones' right from home

After almost two decades, David Roberts, an avid mountain climber and respectful seeker of Native American relics, has written a companion to his book “In Search of the Old Ones.” This companion, “The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the ...(Apr 4, 2015, Deseret News)

Utahns will recognize references to places in the southern desert and passages about Mormons that put the book in a cultural context. There is a brutal rape scene that's generally described, some sexual passages and some rough language, including ...(Apr 4, 2015, Deseret News)

Book review: 'Caught Prepared' shares 25 tips to prepare for all types of ...

Gamma Club of Woodward will host Carol Headrick at their annual Book Review Tuesday, April 7, 2015 at the Josie Adams Cultural Center. Headrick will present a first-person book review of the book, “This is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” by Ann ...(Apr 5, 2015, WoodwardNews.net (subscription))

The two are a lot alike, self-contained strivers with disappointed hopes and wisecracking tendencies. Both can adapt and grow. Betty has become a book reader under George's tutelage; if she prefers Nicholas Sparks to classic literature, he can live ...(Apr 5, 2015, Florida Times-Union)

Book review: Poignant stories of women struggling for meaning

The women in the 11 stories that make up "Single, Carefree, Mellow," the debut collection by Katherine Heiny, are of various ages and are involved with various men. They are also in various states of learning the same truth. None of the women really ...(Apr 5, 2015, Anniston Star)